Ask HN: How to fix a demotivating GitHub timeline?

2 points by schafele 5 years ago | 1 comment

Let's assume you contribute to Open Source from time to time and take a look at your GitHub timeline which looks quite empty, such as this one [1]. Valuable contributions, but demotivating on a wall. This is quite bad because Open Source can also benefit from those contributors and it would be very nice to find a good way of visualising less contributions in a awesome looking and motivating graph. Any ideas for that?

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ExlFmmTWEAIUP0J?format=jpg&name=medium

Disclaimer/Why do I ask this: I am one of the founders of https://codeprints.dev and we sell custom prints of GitHub timelines. We encountered that many people are interested in our prints because they are also proud of their work. We got a lot of feedback that such a print can be very motivating. Unfortunately, if you have less contributions, the timeline looks quite empty and obviously, people don't want to put empty prints on their walls.

phendrenad2 5 years ago |

Maybe for people with spotty timelines, instead focus on the number of lines of code or something. Show the whole year as a pie chart, broken down by language, or framework, or something. Maybe show a wikipedia-style timeline view of contributions/commits by the user. That way long gaps can be obscured, since your timeline doesn't have to be perfectly linear.